In view of the recent popularity of digital publications, several tools allowing the creation of a digital edition of a publication, such as a newspaper, a magazine and/or a book, have become available. Many of these tools allow users to import content such as text, images and/or video, format the content, and generate a digital edition, all without requiring programming skills.
For example, iBook Author™ from Apple™ offers a software solution that allows authors with no editing or programming background to edit and create digital books, one page at a time, via a user friendly interface. These known tools use different systems and methods for creating a digital edition of a publication.
One of the drawbacks of several of the available solutions is that they are not designed for a collaborative environment where a plurality of users create, edit, and/or delete pages of a single or of several edition(s) simultaneously and may request concurrent compilation of the edition, to preview or publish the digital edition.
In the context of a digital periodical publication, such as a daily newspaper, collaborative work of a plurality of individuals who concurrently create, edit, and/or delete pages and/or sections of a single edition is essential, given that the delay for creating the edition is short and therefore requires the structure of the daily digital newspaper (or e-newspaper) edition to be built and updated in parallel, by several people.
The applicant is aware of digital platforms or environments which allow collaboration between users for the creation of a digital publication. Such a platform allowing a plurality of authors to edit the content of a digital edition simultaneously during the creation process is described in United States patent application No. 2010/0004944.
However, known solutions do not provide a system or a method which allow concurrent compilations of the edited content of the digital edition in a collaborative environment while users/authors are still editing pages of the edition. Therefore, using known solutions, when one of the multiple users requests compilation of the digital edition (for example in order to preview the digital edition), the compilation of the edition by the system may raise compilation errors relative to pages of the edition that are currently being edited by other users and may not be formatted properly. Moreover, multiple simultaneous requests for preview of the edition by different users may cause system instability or long delays for each compilation.
In view of the above, there is a need for an improved system and method for the collaborative production of a digital edition, which would be able to overcome or at least minimize some of the above-discussed prior art concerns.